Antonia Finnane

Antonia Finnane is an historian of China with an interest in clothing as social history in twentieth century China.  She is the author of Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), a wide-ranging study of Chinese fashions from late imperial times to the early twenty-first century.  Over the last ten years she has been researching the culture and technology of clothing production in the Mao years, and is now writing a book on this subject. Together with Yuki Liu (Liu Yuqi), she is currently also engaged in a collaborative research project on the history of hosiery in modern China.

Relevant Publications

Antonia Finnane, “Disappearing from the Picture?: Female Figures in Pattern Books of the Mao Years,” in The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, ed. Aga Skrodzka, Xiaoning Lu, and Katarzyna Marciniak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 475–99.

Antonia Finnane, “Lost in Socialist Transformation? Shanghai Style in the Mao Years,” in Styling Shanghai, ed. Christopher Breward and Juliette MacDonald (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 181–210.

Antonia Finnane, “Mode in China,” The Deal,  14 November, 2019.

Antonia Finnane, ‘Not your prom dress’: why a Chinese dress set off a cultural debate about identity and history,” The Conversation, 7 May 2018.

Antonia Finnane, “Sewing Manuals in 1950s China: Socialist Narratives and Dress Patterns from New Democracy to Socialist Transformation,” in Transglobal Fashion Narratives: Clothing Communication, Style Statements and Brand Storytelling, ed. Anne Peirson-Smith, and Joseph H. Hancock II (London: Intellect Ltd, 2018), 115–36.

Antonia Finnane and Peidong Sun, “Textiles and Apparel in the Mao Years: Uniformity, Variety, and the Limits of Autarchy,” in Making Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape, ed. Wessie Ling and Simone Segre-Reinach (London: IB Tauris, 2017), 3–18.

Antonia Finnane, “Cold War Sewing Machines: Production and Consumption in 1950s China and Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 75, no. 3 (August 2016): 755–83.

Antonia Finnane, “Tailors in 1950s Beijing: Private Enterprise, Career Trajectories, and Historical Turning Points in the Early PRC,” Frontiers of History 6, no. 1 (February 2011): 117–37.

Antonia Finnane, “In Search of the Jiang Qing Dress,” Fashion Theory 9, no. 1 (2005): 3–22

Antonia Finnane, “Yu Feng and the 1950s Dress Reform Campaign: Global Hegemony and Local Agency In the Art of Fashion,” in Yu Chien Ming, Ed., Wu Sheng Zhi Sheng: Jindai Zhongguo Funü Yu Wenhua, 1650 – 1950 [Silent Voices: Women and Modern Chinese Culture, 1650 – 1950], Academia Sinica, Taipei, 2003, Vol. II, 235 – 268.